Primum Non Nocere

Film scholars have commented upon the native power of the documentary medium to convey the impression of unmanipulated reality. The intimation of ‘truthiness’ – Steve Colbert’s delectable mot – becomes especially pernicious in a thankfully rare subgenre I’ll call the ‘ill-intentioned’ documentary. Here, the maker’s attitude towards some painful psycho-social problem is subverted by the very images which are supposed to promote compassionate understanding.

For example, in a film about Mexican-American street youths several decades ago most of the latinos sported gross acne, scraggly mustaches, gold teeth, and copious off-putting attitude. Their girlfriends were slovenly dressed and spoke like Tijuana trollops. Despite the off-screen narrator’s earnest lament about the subjects’ dismal lives, their appearance projected an aura of disreputable entitlement, evoking distaste rather than sympathy for unwary viewers. One would like to believe the maker did not consciously create the prejudicial dissonance between word and imagine.

Compliance, written and directed by newcomer Craig Zobel, has received rave reviews from knowledgeable critics. Inter alia, The New Yorker’s David Denby and Peter Travers of Rolling Stone have hailed Zobel for baring the dreadful ease with which ordinary people abdicate moral choice in the face of authoritarian pressure. Nevertheless, I rate Compliance an ill-intentioned “mockumentary”, in which the audience is the chief victim of the disparity between its noble aims and ignoble ends.

The opening titles state that Compliance is based on true events, an assertion one views with misgiving. I don’t doubt that the tragedy upon which the film is based did occur in 2004, at a McDonald’s in Mount Washington, Kentucky. It’s Zobel’s exploitative re-packaging of that occasion’s grim realities which spur one’s mistrust and aversion.

Zobel has changed the Kentucky McDonald’s to a “Chickwich” in an small Ohio town. It’s a Friday afternoon. The usual bustling crowd is about to descend and Sandra, the evening manager, has just arrived. She’s a stocky woman in her late forties or early fifties, touchy about her attractiveness. You empathize with her defensiveness when she tells a pair of employees gabbing about sex that she, too, enjoys a robust love life with her fiancee.

Sandra is a tough but not unkind boss; totally dedicated to her customers; thoroughly knowledgeable about her operation down to the last french fry. She presides over a staff of several people nearly her age and a gaggle of minimum-waged late ‘teens. The young people have no great affection for the job, yet do it well enough under Sandra’s ever-vigilant eye – except for one slacker who may or may not have left a freezer door seriously ajar. The weekend’s meat supply is threatened, a bacon shortfall threatens to become a big problem, no laughing matter for Sandra.

For she sees herself as a rising star in Chickwich’s tatty firmament. Her anxiety about blame from above regarding the costly food spoilage is palpable, escalating pressure on her crew to stay on top of their game. In this already taut setting, she gets a call from a police officer who says a female customer has just filed a complaint that a waitress, Becky, filched money from her purse earlier in the day. He wants to avoid hauling off Becky to the station; asks Sandra to hold Becky in the back of the restaurant pending his arrival to clear up the problem.

Sandra complies uncomfortably. The cop next intimates conspiratorially intimates that Becky’s detention could become crucial to a larger investigation into her boy friend’s sale of illicit drugs. Sandra buys his unlikely tale. Through a subtly orchestrated regime of wheedling, praise, and menace, he chivvies her into interrogating the hapless younger, beginning with a mutually humiliating strip-search.

Becky’s ensuing Golgatha endures into the small hours of the night. By this time, the ‘investigation’ has turned definitively perverse, and Sandra has swept several employees and her boyfriend into the dismal proceedings. They stand by, or participate with varying degrees of discomfort.

I won’t go into the ghastly details. Suffice to say that rape is in the air when an older male employee flatly refuses to join in Becky’s degradation. Sandra and staff suddenly wake to the horrid realization that they’ve been scammed. (Viewers have known the ‘cop’ is bogus for some time. He’s revealed to be a disturbingly ordinary family guy, weaving his sicko web from a comfortable home.)

Three months later a brief sequence shows Sandra in the midst of a TV interview, the program’s nature undisclosed. A subtitle describes her as a fired fast food worker. She chats uneasily about the weather during a break. Scant words are exchanged about the Chickwich debacle, but an 800 pound gorilla is clearly in the room. A laconic sentence states there have been 70 such incidents in America, then the screen goes black.

Compliance is competently acted. (Ann Dowd, as Sandra, adroitly excites one’s pity and revulsion, as she becomes ever more unglued in her absurdist endeavor to hold the fort out front while supervising the obscenity unfolding in back). The mise-en-scene artfully captures the sense and sensibility of a dumbed- down hick backwater. Zobel’s direction is credible – too credible.

What does he really wants us to make of, or to take from this deeply suspect project? Are his objectives honorable – to tutor and warn that anyone, given the right – or vilely wrong — circumstances, can be intimidated by abusive authority? Indeed, that all of us may harbor an innate yen to submit to overweaning authority?

The film’s many admirers allude to the shameful willingness to surrender moral responsobility of participants in the notorious Milgram experiment at Yale; or of German citizens during the Nazi era. But the reliability of Milgrim’s evidence has been seriously questioned. And the anti-Semitism pervading Nazi Germany rendered much its population exquisitely susceptible to approving the Jewish persecution if passively; neither wanting or caring to know about the Holocaust’s brute reality.

I don’t pretend to fathom Zobel’s unconscious motives. But I must wonder if he consciously, if dimly, intuited that his aims were questionable, pitched at inflaming the emotions rather than edifying the mind; encouraging contempt for the characters as well as ourselves.

Compliance’s protagonists aren’t portrayed as morally bankrupt, rather deeply stupid. With the exception of the sadistic prankster, the director paints them as well-intentioned but utterly witless good people, charter members of journalist H.L. Mencken’s heartland ‘boobocracy’. (Sandra’s boyfriend is particularly doltish.)

They hate what they doing or witnessing. Zobel’s voyeuristic camera takes into their midst, into the very belly of the beast they’ve collectively created. I feel there’s a subtle implication that some may even have begun enjoying Becky’s debasement, in some corner of the id where the snakes and lizards writhe.

Step by step, Zobel invites us to linger over the transgressive violation of Becky’s body and spirit. One wants to turn away, overcome by shame and loathing. Fans of torture- porn cinema savor the atrocities of the Saw and Hostel franchises they’ve paid to attend. Zobel’s semi-torture porn ambience took me utterly by surprise, even knowing something about the film in advance.

While estimable critics like Travers and Denby praise Compliance, the majority of viewers I interviewed felt ill-used, as did I. I’ve always maintained that primum non nocere, the physician’s first duty not to harm, should be the credo of the documentarian, and now the ‘mockumentarian’. It should pertain to subject and audience.

Zobel, I fear, hasn’t taken the oath. It came as no surprise when several people walked out of the movie. I would have left too, but had to stay in order to review this noxious piece of work – and now urge you not to see it. I’ve never given this advice in decades of writing about cinema. But I don’t give money to phony charities either.

An earlier version of this review appeared in Clinical Psychiatry News.

About Dr. Greenberg

Harvey Roy Greenberg, MD is a psychoanalyst / journalist and pop culture and media critic based in New York City...[more]For clinical consultation in psychiatry and psychoanalysis specializing in adolescents, and editorial consultation on medical and other writings, email Dr. Greenberg at info@doctorgreenberg.net or call him at (212) 595-5220 to arrange an appointment.TV and RadioDr. Greenberg’s television guest appearances include Today, Good Morning America, CBS Evening News, CBS Sunday, Larry King Live, Donahue, CNN PrimeTime, Dr Katz, Professional Therapist, a BBC-TV documentary on Patrick O’Brian, and a Showtime Cable Network special on “Scream Queens”.Dr. Greenberg has also appeared on national and international radio programs, including PBS, BBC, and CBC.[more]